The point behind ENC is to limit the effect that USD has in this game. It's currently "kindof" doing it's job; however, it can't effectively be lowered, b/c of the way ENC currently behaves. If you have an enchanter that you want to put a huge corn on, you better make sure he has more than a few million levels. If you want a wall, it better have HP, and not just a PL backed minion, or that AC is worthless. So, then, what could solve both of these problems. Why not redo ENC so that it is team wide, and based on MPR instead of stats. It could be set to something reasonable, 70-100M per M MPR. So, a 5M MPR team could have like 400M ENC, to be spread throughout his/her team in whatever fashion he or she chooses. This way the problems with the current ENC and multi minion teams won't arise, yet ENC will be able to actually do the job it was created to do.

You could build a massive Mage (or Familiar holder, or whatever), then towards the end of your bonus run, buy a base minion and strap on the largest weapon you could fit.

And have the 'weapon allowance' fed by the size of the original character.

It would seem like the best of both worlds.

Another thing it might, encourage, is that every team would have to utilise thier ENC to the maximum. As you have the same amount your neighbour has, and if you're not using it, you're losing out.

Which migh tbe easier to fill up totally with a linear weapon x cost, but be less able to fill if the only slot you have is going from a +15 to +16 corn which might take millions more than your ENC. (If that makes sense, capping you at a lesser ENC potential until your ENC grows large enough for that one point upgrade.)

Besides, Multi Minions have so many advantages over single minions that ENC is really (apart fomr SoD splash damage) the only thing going for them.

Remove that, and you might as well remove the choice of making less than 4 minions.

I think it is a decent idea I just don't agree with the overall mechanics since you have to take into account what GL so aptly pointed out. Maybe if this worked per Individual MPR levels rather than team wide this would be more appropriate.

Hey, if someone wants to spend upwards of 30M CB to hire a 2nd minion just to increase their ENC a small amount, have at it.

It would be more like running a Familiar Holder with just an AoJ. Then at the end of your bonus run, buying a cheap minion to strap on your legacy uber weapon, and getting the full effect form that weapon, as you're using all the built up ENC form your Familiar holder.

Then at the end of your bonus run, buying a cheap minion to strap on your legacy uber weapon, and getting the full effect form that weapon, as you're using all the built up ENC form your Familiar holder.

You still wouldn't have the ST/DX/HP to use that weapon, it'd be no different than the current system. The only thing it would allow would be very high AC on a low HP wall, which I'm fine with, if they want to risk that.

It would be more like running a Familiar Holder with just an AoJ. Then at the end of your bonus run, buying a cheap minion to strap on your legacy uber weapon, and getting the full effect form that weapon, as you're using all the built up ENC form your Familiar holder.

Single minion NCB runs do that now. Look at Shade, did just that.

Buying a new minion just for more ENC is the least of the problem this game will have and 30+M for a bit more ENC is not much.

If someone wants to buy a new minion as a tattoo holder, so they can armor up their main minion, they will do it whether ENC is character or minionwide.

I really doubt an ENC change like Titan proposes will change the behavior of people hiring minions.

My thoughts would be this, upon hiring each minion brings MPR to the pool thus increasing the ENC levels of the team. Now I have always thought this to be wrong since this goes against the very idea of what ENC was created to do in the first place. Hiring another minion should be nothing more than that. Each. Minion should have their very own ENC to work with that could only be affected by one thing besides XP and that would be the RoE. (Unless I have gone crazy it should make sense.....lol)

Now I have always thought this to be wrong since this goes against the very idea of what ENC was created to do in the first place.

No it doesn't. The whole point of ENC is to stop USD from influncing the game a great deal, while still allowing strategy to flourish, and CBD to have value. How we choose to do this is up to us( devs really ). This solution allows a very large array of strategy, while still limiting the amount of USD you can use. If you did it, "per minion MPR" you'd still be allowed to spend the same USD, the number of strategies would just be narrowed, b/c you would have to spend the money on fewer minions. Does that make sense?

As 4 minion character do not get a bit more xp than single minions ones (as was the case in CB1), there should be little downside to characters wanting to maximize their potential.

Also

Your opponent is sitting at 7 Million under thier ENC, as all they have left to buff is thier Corn, and that would take 10 Million in total.

That is a great point.

However there is a benefit for staying under your ENC. Your PR will be lower and your rewards possibly better.

I would of course keep the PR addition from items minion specific. Which, in the land of NW=PR, was one of the best changes Jon/NS made. Making that +10 corn on a 1m xp minion not add as much as the same corn on a 100m xp minion.

That is only a part of the reason ENC was created, the other part was to keep Vets from throwing uber gear on a NCB and pwn the ranks.

It would still do this, possibly even better. Since we could possibly lower ENC since it would be doing it's job more effectively. You still wouldn't be able to put a 200M weapon on a 1M MPR char, no matter how you split up the exp.

Then I stand corrected. ENC still needs a redo and I honestly do not think making it teamwide is the answer. In realistic terms you learn as you go, as it stands right now ENC reflects this on an individual basis as it should. In my opinion Titans idea of making it strictly by MPR is a good way of doing it.

This would bring back the mini tank with the huge weapon and allow mages to actually wear big dbs. Enc is tied to stats because it makes sense for it to be... if we're going to have the stupid thing the current system is pretty damn good.

My definition of a nerf is lowering the overall effectiveness of something in relation to everything else. Evening the playing field for enc is a buff to multi minion teams, and a massive nerf to tank teams. It doesn't matter whether you increase the mage teams enc to a tanks or lower a tanks enc to a mages or put it right in the middle somewhere.

BTW I don't feel we need a multi minion buff and I would rather not play in mage blender.

Now see this is why I like discussing this, I hadn't thought of those points nov. I will have to ponder this some more. But, do you think ENC needs to be "wrangled" in a little more to be effective up top?

Honestly no, depending on setup I can be as close as 100m to my enc limit, and my weapons don't hit everyone despite having some of the highest plus in game. I would love to see something done for multi-minion teams though, leave the HP STR ratios right where they are
and give AS based HP half credit at least. Something to help the fools who want to run heavy tanks on 4 minion teams with even xp distribution.

But could you even get close to your ENC without USD. B/c if that is the case, wouldn't the "best" solution be to lower ENC, but increase the effectiveness of physical weapons, so that it would kindof keep high spenders where they currently are, but increase the effectiveness of non-USD tanks?

I can only think of one decent way to use gs/haste and it includes an RoS, 4 sets of tank weapons and lots of CBD, and is in no way shape or form cost effective.

Its entirely way to easy to get DMed without RoS protection, and if you rely on the GS for enc its only going to be 10x more difficult for you towards the top because of the amount of DM up there. (10x is a random number I pulled out of no where but you catch my drift.)

XP is far too valuable to spend on solely increasing enc, there has to be at least some side benefit, and with GS there is the terrible downside of dm, which compounds your existing enc problems into even lower stats.

What it needs is to not affect trained stats, but to reduce item bonuses to an item of lower NW.

So, for instance, if you're at near-ENC-penalty levels with a +15 Corn, when you upgrade it to +16 Corn, instead of penalizing you by drastically cutting base stats, it should penalize you by REDUCING THE CORN TO ONLY GRANT A BONUS OF ONE THAT'S ONLY +15 and some tiny extra.

Basically, ENC should be "this is the effective NW limit, anything above it is useless, NOT damaging".

The only way I could see that working is if it still ran off of the same enc amount like .05 .30 ect and that was applied to all items the minion uses in terms of how upgraded it is. It is would take quite a bit of work to figure out which items should be lowered otherwise. After all, you have quite a number of items that it can effect, tattoo included.

Well, let's say you have items of NWs X1, Y1, Z1 and so on.
The encumbrance factor is the same as before (0.98 or 0.91 or 0.52, etc).
For those without experience with how encumbrance works, 1.00 would mean no encumbrance, while 0.00 would mean completely over the top encumbrance.

You multiply the exact encumbrance factor E with each NW to reach new "virtual" NWs for each item...
X2 = X1 * E, Y2 = Y1 * E, Z2 = Z1 * E, etc
And then, you "recreate" the effect of that item for the calculated "virtual" NW.

For instance, say you have this:
An Elven Long Bow [6x23000] (+210) worth $275,778,365
on a minion that ends up with an encumbrance of 0.5 (you don't care what exact other items are on this guy for this particular calculation, you only care about the encumbrance factor, which depends on total NW on the minion and max effective NW accepted - you just put on it twice as many as you should - let's see the exact effect).
For the "x", it's easy - you reduce it to 11500 (well, technically, it should be slightly over 11499.5 but let's skip that part and just round up for x).
For the "+", it's more complicated... apparently +210 means very roughly 96,432,163 NW, so after you multiply by 0.5 you get 48,216,081 (rounded down), which translates into somewhere around +158, I think ?

So, with an ENC of 0.5 (loaded up twice as much NW as you should), this:
An Elven Long Bow [6x23000] (+210) worth $275,778,365
transforms termporarily into this:
An Elven Long Bow [6x11500] (+158) worth ~$137.88 mil

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